IGN.com's Best of 2000 Awards

Why it rocked: Giving credit to Gals Fighters as the best fighter of the year is giving credit to the NeoGeo Pocket Color as the handheld system for fighters. 1999's SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millennium was one of the very best handheld games ever, and SNK followed it up in 2000 with a clever spoof in Gals Fighters that still had all the control and graphics, and it played even faster. Oh, and it's "bouncy" too. We're a little surprised that readers chose Street Fighter Alpha over SNK's game -- in the big picture, Capcom's SF usually bests SNK's KOF-type games (which we're including Gals Fighters as a part of, since it's a compilation of the popular hotties of that series). It makes sense, but we expected the NGPC fans to make a stand here. Giving credit where it's due, Crawfish's Street Fighter Alpha did a phenomenal job with the graphics and control of a 32-bit game playing on an 8-bit system. This was the closest contest of the list, and perhaps either way the Readers' Votes went, we probably would have had to split the vote and gone the other way.